XCOR officials refrain from disclosing date for Lynx test flights

By Brandon Mulder bmulder@mrt.com

Published 7:36 pm, Saturday, January 16, 2016

Photo: Tim Fischer\Reporter-Telegram

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Chinese journalists get a tour Friday 8-21-2015 and information on XCOR and the planned flights out of Midland Air & Space Port and a closeup look of the Lynx madel on display in the airport terminal. Tim Fischer\Reporter-Telegram

Chinese journalists get a tour Friday 8-21-2015 and information on XCOR and the planned flights out of Midland Air & Space Port and a closeup look of the Lynx madel on display in the airport terminal. Tim

Conspicuously placed in a hangar along Interstate 20, XCOR Aerospace continues to build its presence in Midland. Although it’s moved the goal posts on the launch date for the Lynx test flights — from first quarter of 2016 to a tentative and undisclosed date — the company is steadily boosting forward. And soon enough, it’ll be boosting upward.

Timing, however, is still up in the air. XCOR CEO Jay Gibson is cautious about disclosing the schedule, fearing that any such deadline would be a distraction for the company.

“Nobody’s done this before, so there’s an element here where we’re building the protocol as we go,” he said. “We’re very excited about how close we are, but we’re very cautious. We don’t want to get distracted by saying we missed the date.”

The Lynx Mark I spacecraft, which is under development at XCOR’s Mojave Desert, California, facility, is the company’s showpiece. It’s a reusable two-seat vehicle designed to take passengers from runway to suborbital, black-sky space and back in 30 to 40 minutes. The company already has sold hundreds of tickets at $150,000 apiece, according to XCOR officials. The craft reaches sub-orbit in 3.5 minutes, followed by six or seven minutes of weightlessness and a slow glide back home.

With a dozen thrusters situated around the craft, passengers can manipulate their view in that six- to seven-minute period while keeping the same trajectory.

“If you’re flying from Mojave, and you want to see San Francisco, just roll the vehicle over 40 degrees. If you want to see the Grand Canyon, just spin it around and you can see the Grand Canyon,” said former XCOR president Andrew Nelson at a 2013 Tech Expo.

While the company remains generally tight-lipped on projected test-flight dates, Midland has become the company’s center of activity for engine technology development, Gibson said.

“We are seeing a tremendous demand for our engine’s technology outside of the Lynx, so I think what you’ll see from us in the near future is that our engines are going to be part of larger launch programs,” he said. “Which is huge, because it validates our technology, it validates that it will be a successful revenue stream for us, and we’re actively engaged in pursuing that in full force — the ability for XCOR to sell its engines outside of the Lynx.”

Midland is currently home to about 60 percent of the company’s employees. A team directly related to the Lynx structure remains in Mojave, Gibson said. The spacecraft’s first test flights will be launched from Mojave, which has a low-traffic airspace environment allowing test crews to fly multiple times in a row. Once testing is completed, the craft itself will be moved to Midland for commercial space-tourism flights.

“The cockpit’s in, the gears are ready to go, and we anticipate the wings to be there in the very near future,” Gibson said. “Once that happens, then you start the next phase of finishing things off, starting to couple things together, and rolling the plane out.”

But the development has been faced setbacks as engineers problem-solve through challenges. One of those challenges, XCOR CTO Michael Valant said, is calibrating the craft’s flaps, rudders and elevons to endure subsonic (below the speed of sound), transonic (near the speed of sound) and supersonic (above the speed of sound) speeds. Foregoing electronic flight controls, the pilot must be able to manually control the craft through the different speeds of its flight trajectory.

“It’s very important to ensure that the control stick forces remain low enough for the pilot to handle at all times,” Valant said in an email. “To add to the challenge, all of the control mechanisms must be extremely robust and stiff, yet lightweight and small enough to fit inside of the vehicle aeroshell.”